Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

“Not yet.” She assumed a cool professional tone. “You know you shouldn’t run, dear. Now come in and sit down and be quiet.”

“It’s hard to hold myself back. I should be out looking for him.”

“No, Abel. There’s a friend of yours here. Come in and talk to him.”

Johnson came through the back kitchen, his wife’s solicitous arm around his shoulders. I had a queer twinge of pity, or some other feeling, when I saw the two together: the handsome fire-haired woman supporting the aging man. He needed support. His white head, darkened with perspiration, drooped on his shoulders. Hatless and coatless and unshaved, he looked smaller and older than I remembered him.

As soon as he saw me and Ann, he straightened up and pushed his wife away with a weak impatient gesture. I suspected that he was drawing on his last reserves of energy. “Cross? What brings you here? That courthouse grapevine working overtime?”

“Mrs. Miner came to my office about an hour ago.” I explained why.

While I was talking, Larry Seifel came in behind him and paused in the doorway. Tall and young and broadshouldered in a double-breasted gabardine suit that accentuated his build, he made a curious contrast with his employer. Mrs. Johnson’s familiar glance at him seemed to take note of the contrast. Except that his eyes were a shade too sharp and bright in his tanned face, his square crew-cut a shade too consciously youthful, Larry Seifel was a very presentable young man.

A look of recognition passed between him and Ann Devon. Her blush was still burning like the glow from an inner fire. On the other side of the table, Mrs. Miner seemed to be trying to make herself small.

Before I had finished talking, Johnson turned on her. He shouted in a terrible, broken voice: “What are you trying to do? Get Jamie killed? Is that what you’re trying to do?”

Her brown eyes rolled in apprehension: “I thought if I could find Fred.”

“You thought! Nobody told you to think. I left strict orders that nobody was to go to the authorities.” He was breathing fast. His face was swollen tight with blood and anger.

His wife laid a hand on his shoulder. “Abel, please. She meant well. Please don’t excite yourself, darling.”

“How can I help it? Why did you let her go?”

“I didn’t know she’d left. Anyway, it’s done no harm. Mr. Cross isn’t the police. But he’s half convinced me that we ought to call them.”

“I agree, Abe,” Seifel said from the doorway. “There’s no sense in fooling around with a gang of kidnappers.”

“I absolutely forbid it.” Johnson took a few faltering steps and leaned on a corner of the table. “I’m not taking any chances with my boy’s life. Anybody who thinks he’s going to is going to have to do it over my dead body.”

His wife regarded him anxiously. His mention of death was uncomfortably close to the literal truth. He looked very ill. She said, in the tone of a nurse humoring a patient: “Don’t upset yourself, dear. We’ll do as you say. Nobody’s going to call them.”

Seifel came up beside me and spoke in my ear: “Ask him how long he intends to wait. This is serious.”

“Why don’t you?”

“He won’t take suggestions from me. When I try to argue, he blows his top. It’s a pretty mess, I’m telling you.”

I said: “How long do you want us to wait, Mr. Johnson?” His wife gave me an appealing glance, and I added: “I think you’re making a mistake, but I won’t act until I have your go-ahead.”

“You’re damned right you won’t.” He lifted his sagging head. “They said in the letter they’d have him back today. I’ve done my part in the bargain. If there’s any justice or any mercy, they’ll do their part. We’ll give them until midnight tonight.” He threw a fierce look at Mrs. Miner: “You hear that?”

“Yessir, I hear it. I promise I’ll stay right here. But what about Fred?”

“What about him?”

“He’s gone, too.”

“I know that, Mrs. Miner. If I thought that he was responsible for this, I–” Johnson choked on his emotion.

Mrs. Johnson took his arm and led him to the door. “Darling, you should lie down. You’ve had such a hard morning.”

“I won’t lie down. I couldn’t possibly rest.” But the heavy voice had faded into querulousness. He went along with her.

Seifel’s bright satiric glance followed them out. “Brother, what a situation. Abe’s carrying a coronary, you know. This stuff is murder. I practically had to lift him into the car at Sapphire Beach, when he got off the train.”

He took a fresh white handkerchief from his breast pocket, unfolded it, and wiped his forehead. He had a lot of forehead.

“Shouldn’t he be seen by a doctor?”

“Helen will know what’s best. She’s an ex-nurse. As a matter of fact, she nursed Abe through his coronary. Helen’s a very wonderful girl, in my opinion.”

I disliked his proprietary tone. The wire Helen Johnson walked was higher and thinner than most people’s, but she seemed to have somebody ready to catch her if she fell.

Mrs. Miner left the kitchen, carrying a silver coffee-service on a tray. Her red-rimmed eyes gazed straight ahead, fixed on some desolate scene in the distant regions of her mind.

Ann came around the table with the plate of sandwiches. She thrust it under Seifel’s nose. “Have a sandwich, Mr. Seifel. You look hungry.” Her furious blush had dwindled to oval patches on her cheekbones.

“Hi there, Annie. Thanks, I will.” He took a sandwich and lifted the top to examine its contents. “Salmon I like. What are you doing in cette galère? Hired yourself out as a cook? I hear there’s money in it.”

“Mrs. Miner made the sandwiches,” she answered primly. “I’m Mr. Cross’s assistant, or had you forgotten? I understand your memory is abominable.”

He patted her shoulder, simultaneously taking a bite of his sandwich. “At least the salmon is good,” he said in a sandwich-thickened voice. “What’s the beef, Annie?”

Ann lost her poise completely. She thrust his hand away like a hurt adolescent: “Don’t you call me Annie. I hate that name.”

“Miss Devon, then. Did I do anything?” He made a deprecatory face, but he seemed to be enjoying the situation.

“You know what you did. Your memory’s not that bad. It’s not as bad as your morals.”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“I won’t. You lied to me last night. You said you had a client from out of town. You stood me up so you could entertain Mrs. Johnson.”

“Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Johnson. They’re clients, aren’t they? And they’re from out of town. This is outside the city limits, isn’t it?”

“Go on,” she said. “ Talk like a lawyer. You won’t change the fact that you lied. I hate lawyers.” A single tear ran down her cheek and dropped from the point of her chin into the plate of sandwiches she was holding.

I reached across Seifel and took one. “If you two want to finish this off in private, I’ll go and sit in the car.”

Seifel turned on a smile. “Sorry, old man. Don’t mind us. Miss Devon and I are old sparring-partners.”

“There are better times and places.”

Ann left the room with a backward look at Seifel which was meant to be withering and was only pathetic. She seemed to have fallen hard, and nobody had caught her. My dislike of Seifel was turning acute.

“Women!” he said, with a humorous lift of his shoulders.

“Ann Devon’s my favorite young woman.”

“Mine, too. In my book she’s the complete darling. But even the best of them let their emotions get out of kilter now and then. They can never understand that business is business. They want to make everything into a personal issue.”